from the really? dept

As you probably heard, Borders went out of business recently and Barnes & Noble purchased a bunch of Borders assets around its trademarks. Still, it was a bit surprising when we received an email this week asking us to change any links we have on Techdirt that go to Borders.com to redirect to Barnesandnoble.com:

Barnes & Noble recently purchased most of the Borders trademarks and intellectual property in a recent auction. As a result of this purchase, we started transitioning the Borders.com website to Barnesandnoble.com via redirects.

We noticed that your site is currently linking to http://www.borders.com/online/store/Home , and I’d like to reach out and ask you to kindly update your links to the corresponding URLs on Barnesandnoble.com. We have redirects in place for many Borders.com pages, so you can use that to help you determine the correct landing pages on Barnesandnoble.com.

To be honest, I absolutely could not recall ever linking to Borders, but I did some digging, and found that we did so... three and a half years ago in a post about Borders.com's last ditch attempt to try to be innovative with a different kind of home page. Because of that we linked to the front page of Borders.com. For a variety of reasons, it would be stupid to change that link. In the context of the story, it wouldn't make any sense at all.

But all of this makes me wonder why Barnes & Noble is wasting their time sending emails to people like this. If it wants to redirect people, just set up some redirects. Don't expect everyone to drop everything and go change ancient links.

from the the-magic-shelf-ain't-gonna-do-it dept

Back in 1998 when I worked at an e-commerce startup, I spent a few months working on a project to try to rethink the online retail "browsing" experience. The idea was simple: the experience of browsing an online store was still inherently different than walking into a book or music store, where you would browse across many items on shelves and maybe discover a totally unexpected gem. That process doesn't seem to work as well online. We were unable to solve it a decade ago, but I'm always interested in ways that others try to solve the same problem. However, so far, no one has really been able to do something amazingly useful in the browsing department... and that includes the new Borders website. For years, Borders, the well-known bookstore chain, had handed over its entire online operations to Amazon.com. Basically, if you went to the Borders website, you just saw Amazon.com with a Borders logo. However, a little while ago, the company decided to end that deal and strike out on its own.

The new site has now launched with its main selling point apparently being a shelf-browsing interface using Flash. Unfortunately, it seems that whoever built the website modeled it almost too much like a real physical bookshelf. That is, it includes all of the inefficiencies of a real bookshelf, without adding in many benefits. It's a neat little gimmick, but unless it adds more functionality quickly, it's difficult to see this putting much of a dent into Amazon's efforts. Update: In sort of, but not entirely, related news -- a judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit filed against Borders and Amazon for working together. The court found that there was no evidence that the guy filing the suit ever paid more than marketprice for a book due to the two companies working together.

from the doubtful dept

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, George Jones, the CEO of Borders, discusses his company's plans to remain relevant as more and more commerce is done online. Borders' story is an interesting one, in that its struggles are being felt by a wide variety of traditional retailers right now. Jones' insights into the changing nature of e-commerce is interesting. He notes that when Borders first decided to sell online, it pretty much had to partner with Amazon, because of the infrastructure that it had built up. Now, however, options for third-party fulfillment (also an area that Amazon is interested in) will allow Borders to launch its own site (whether it's able to gain any traction remains to be seen). That being said, parts of his vision seems a little off. He imagines that one day customers will come into the store to buy digital goods, like music and e-books, an idea reminiscent of Starbucks' ill-conceived fill up stations, where customers could get music for their MP3 players. The idea of tying a digital good to a physical location is not a model that customers are likely to embrace. Ultimately, there's no easy answer for a company like Borders. It can embrace the internet all it wants, but it's hard to see its fortunes being tied to much else than the continued success of selling physical books in actual stores.